Can LLMs Lie? Investigation beyond Hallucination · HackerPapers discussions

Can LLMs Lie? Investigation beyond Hallucination — mentioned by ben_w

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 10:54:21 GMT

Squirrels have been observed performing deception against other squirrels. Dis/honesty certainly requires some intelligence to pass, but it is a low bar, and one which research has shown that LLMs can perform, e.g. this paper linked from another comment in this discussion: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03518

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Can LLMs Lie? Investigation beyond Hallucination — mentioned by infinite_spin

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 09:33:01 GMT

You might want to consider the difference between "lying" and "hallucinations", wherein one is shown that the agent knew it was being inaccurate, yet chose an answer that achieved some goal set forth; and where hallucinations are essentially gibberish, or otherwise nonsensical responses. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03518

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Can LLMs Lie? Investigation beyond Hallucination — mentioned by wyrdcurt

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:22:40 GMT

I'm talking about using mechanistic interpretability to see the model's intent. If it is deliberately using compromised libraries to weaken some code's security, there's going to be a signal in its hidden activations that it's doing so. Finding these kinds of activations is something Anthropic is actively researching [1] but they're the only ones who can use those techniques to see Claude's intent. On the other hand, if a model is open-weights, in theory whoever is running the model could look inside the activations at runtime to see if a hidden vector associated with "deception" or…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.